The Pilot Earpierce

This week, I'll be writing about a fairly futuristic piece of new technology. When I first heard of the Pilot earpiece, I was reminded of a science fiction book I read in elementary school in which aliens had chips that could be put on a tongue to translate languages instantly. The Pilot is not far off, as the earpieces operate similarly, albeit not quite as smoothly. Still, as a real world application of such an unbelievable idea, the earbuds are impressive. A sample video is embedded at the bottom of the blog.


The Pilot earpiece, which fits like an earbud.

The earpieces work by essentially combining speech recognition software and a speaking output function. Similarly to Apple's Siri, the earpiece identifies a voice and what it is saying as input. Then, it gets to work translating the input into the language of choice. This part is done with a bluetooth connection to a smartphone app. Once it has been successfully translated, the piece plays the sentence in the new language directly into the user's ear. On its surface, nothing about the device seems overly complicated as it is a fairly simple input/output relationship. The real challenge comes in achieving accuracy and capability when you consider not only how many languages there are, but also accents, idioms, and lack of clarity that occurs in standard conversations.

The Pilot is currently being crowdfunded, with potential buyers reserving pairs until the company has enough to begin mass production (likely in the spring). While the first version of the product will likely have its lags and hiccups, the potential of the earbuds in the future is exciting.

http://www.waverlylabs.com/#_overview
http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/05/17/pilot-translates-just-like-the-babel-fish/

The Failure of my Subaru's Programming

I was struggling to come up with a topic to write a journal entry about when I realized that for most of this week, I have been dealing with a programming-related issue. My car on campus, a 2010 Subaru, has had more than its share of issues throughout its life. 
A similar "powder blue" model.

Most recently, it has started to simultaneously flash a battery light, skid warning light, electronic brake light, spin the speedometer needle back to zero, and flicker the headlights.

Some of the lights that will occasionally flash on my dashboard.

Even with my limited knowledge of cars, I made the assumption that there was an issue with either the battery or the alternator, both of which I have had issues with in the past. When I took it in to the shop today, though, the mechanics found nothing wrong with either of those and failed to diagnose the problem. After some investigation online, I came across what could be the issue: rusted or loosened connections between the internal wirings of the car. Because of this disconnect, the car's central processing unit is receiving mixed messages. There is likely an internal voltmeter connected to the battery that reads the level of the battery continuously. With the poor connection, however, this reading is only occasionally being transmitted. Thus, when the connections are jolted loose, by perhaps a hard acceleration or turn, the central processing unit does not receive the input from the voltmeter and reads the voltage of the battery as 0.

There are likely similar signal transmission errors relating to the speedometer (causing it to assume the car is not moving), connection to the electronic break (it may be programmed with a statement such as if the electronic break is not engaged, do not display the light, so no input would turn the light on), and skid sensors, although I am not sure how this lapse in the internal algorithm causes the headlights to flicker. Unfortunately, I do not have even close to the proper understanding of what goes on under the hood of a car to fix these issues, so for now, I will continue to monitor the situation and hope for the best.


http://www.cars101.com/subaru/legacy/legacy2014photos2.html
http://www.cars101.com/subaru/outback/outback2010.html